Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Hello all, sorry for the absence of more than a week, during which I moved house and am now resident in the Royal Borough of Windsor. And very nice it is too, thanks for asking. Windsor Central Station is really lovely, terribly twee and touristy, and alarmingly clean. Must be something to do with the Queen.

Happily, I am now nearer to London in miles, though curiously, that doesn't seem to shorten my commute, due to the fact that Slough is not as good as Reading (station-wise, though actually in most other ways as well), and I am now on a lovely little branch line, which chugs along from Windsor to Slough in its own good time, pausing so that we can enjoy the sights along the way. Well, that's how I've decided to look at it anyway.

The bad news is that my season ticket does not include this byway, so I'm having to pay £2.40 a day to get from Windsor to Slough and back, something that is almost (but not quite) persuading me to put a pair of trainers on and walk the 45 minutes down to Slough station, poverty stricken person that I now am, and a bit of a skinflint where paying for train tickets is concerned.

What all this does mean is that the focus of my ire has now moved up the main line from Reading, and I shall be saying some very stern things about Slough station, based on the fact that it is rubbish. Its only plus point is that it has a mascot in the form of a stuffed dog on platform five, but even that can't make up for the fact that the information boards seem to be on the blink more often than they should be and there aren't enough fast trains to Paddington. Or enough trains in general come to that. I remember the old days when every Paddington train stopped in Slough, what happened? I think what happened is that Maidenhead took over, but I wonder if people would be terribly upset if some trains stopped at Maidenhead AND Slough on the way to Paddington. What do you think?

Don't Like Great Western? Don't Like Slough? Try going into London via the other station in Windsor, to Waterloo I think. You'll get a real taster of what an overcrowded train really is then. Might even make you a lover of First Great Western

I wholly disagree with the 3rd anonymous comment. I recently moved to Windsor and after FGW claim I can get to Paddington to in 35 minutes, i have never experienced this. Its never taken me less than an hour to get to Paddington and when a train does turn up instead of being the HST from Oxford its been replaced with a 2 car smelly unclean over crowded 165.

However go from Windsor and Eton Riverside to waterloo. One direct train, you can sit in first class with a standard ticket if you want, no crowds, clean trains, freindly helpful train staff and you arrive in the 57 minutes they advertise. So whatever service you went to waterloo on was the exception as opposed to the rule.